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I've tried Russell Brown's tip with three different photos, now, and it works like a charm. That said, my backgrounds were pretty simple, so I'm not sure how well this works on a busy background.
My new Avatar is an extraction. The background was a purplish fabric with a small pink random design, and I hated it. This extraction provided the most difficulty because of the pink areas that were similar to my pink sweater. It was the only "busy" background I extracted from. There were a few tiny errors around where the sweater met my neck, but a bit of cloning fixed it.
1. Open Image
2. Go to Filter>extract
3. Click on the edge highlighter tool, top tool on the left.
4. On the right, adjust the size of the brush to where you can just highlight the edges of your subject. Keep the brush more "out" of the subject than inside of it, but be careful to get every last bit of background highlighted in the edges of hair or fur. Once done, clean up selection by holding down "option" on a Mac (figure it out on a PC) to change the brush to an eraser tool and erase large unneeded highlighted areas.
5. Go to the left and choose the "Fill" tool (the bucket) and click on your subject to fill it. If it doesn't work, then you know that you've made a mistake in your highlighting. Go back and start over. You may then hit "preview" to see how it looks.
6. Click OK. If small parts were removed, go over them with the history brush. (I failed to try this, I cloned)
I then save the whole thing, including the layer, in its own folder, where I've put several backgrounds. I select the extraction and the background I want, and open both of them.
7. Choose "move" tool, and move your subject onto the background.
8. Use the transform handles at the corner to keep perspective and to increase or decrease subject on the background, then flatten. Crop if needed.
If I've not explained this well, or left something out, go to Russell Brown's photo tips on the Internet and see for yourself.
Below is another image I did this with. The young lady is Kayla, my granddaughter, age 19 and recently moved to LA to try to break into "the business".
And yes, I worry, worry, worry.
I'm including the original picture her dad sent me, and the one with a different background. The "tough girl" leather clothing she is wearing seemed to need a more dramatic background. I have few backgrounds in my collection, so I chose a stormy sky one. I'm sure others would have worked better. Edited to add: All of this took me about 10 minutes.
Betty
Attached File(s)
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DSC05896-Kayla1.jpg (206.09K)
Number of downloads: 14 -
_BET1663c-Kayla2.jpg (603.12K)
Number of downloads: 13
This post has been edited by Betty LaRue: 06 March 2010 - 12:16 PM
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